News:

PD.com forums: a disorganized echo-chamber full of concordian, Greyfaced radical left-wing nutjobs who honestly believe they can take down imaginary Nazis by distributing flyers. They are highly-suspicious of all newcomers and hostile to almost everyone, including themselves. The only thing they don't take seriously is Discordianism.

Also, when you come across someone claiming to be adamant of "Pro-anti-neo-pre-post-antiism", they are likely to be followers of "Conservative, anti-pro-pre-postism", which has it's long antagonistic history with "pro-anti-neo-ismism"

There is a critical process sometimes called 'The doubting game', which is what most people think of when they think of critical thinking. It has to do with hearing a position and trying to discover the weakness, or the opposite position which falsifies it. Academia trains us to do this almost automatically.

There is another process called 'The believing game' - which is to accept the assertion the other person is making, and then following and extending its logic. You assume that the best possible version of that idea will manifest in the world and then explore where that leads.

In that, you take an opponent's argument, and you improve upon it, to make it the best argument it can be, and then you make your best argument against it.

I hadn't heard that term before! It's not necessarily for oppositional purposes, but another way of critically examining something. Yeah, when exploring an idea, sometimes the best posture isn't to argue against it, but to extend it.

There's also a chapter in The Art of Memetics which talks about the "hapkido of ideas" -- how in hapkido (akido? IDK), you never meet force with force. You wait for your opponent to punch, then you dodge, grab their arm, and pull in almost same direction as the punch, using their own effort to throw them off balance.

As far as the topic is concerned,

A mix of college and Internet forum culture instilled me with this oppositional bite - when engaging an idea, I approach it critically, that is, scanning for weakness. There was a time when I took a multi-year break from this forum because it was enflaming that tendency in me - my friends commented that they felt like when they explained something to me, I was too hung up on scanning for the weakness, finding the axis of disagreement, focusing on why things are wrong. In retrospect, it made me annoying to be around.

Part of my cure for this was to practice "the believing game".

When you encounter a new idea, before you've really thought about it, there is something that happens in your intuition. You make an emotional decision about the idea - you decide to either explore it or defeat it, and then your rational mind starts building up support structures for that decision.

When I was stuck on the Doubting Game, I was doing more defeating than exploring, more challenging than embracing. I was convinced that I was just being super rational - until that "rationality" started to feel like the walls of a black iron prison cell.

Steelmanning is one of the better concepts from Scott Alexander's blog, and it's something he does actually try to do fairly well at times. I'm a big fan of it, though it does require a certain amount of willingness on the part of the person you're debating to not be a complete dingbat (which is increasingly becoming a problem, at least from personal experience).

It's intriguing considering how it all this connects back up to a literal version of anti-antiism.

Would it be too 'out there' to compare it to fight-or-flight too? (hostility on both ends when in a religious context)

Being stuck on the doubting game often leads to a nihilistic rut - being stuck on the believing game causes an individual to hold onto the ideas they treat so dearly, with a much firmer (hence less critical) grip, which is an ideological rut (basically).

So then the way to transcended those trappings is to embrace both approaches at the same time.

Through that, "anti-antiism" begins to mean that it is a re-evaluated system that is both for and against belief systems? Both critical and patient with them as well?